The paleontologist known only as Yusra has been missing since the 1940s. And yet she's responsible for finding one of the world's most important early human fossils. We're still trying to piece together what happened to her.

Over at Trowelblazers, a site devoted the history of women paleontologists, geologists, and archaeologists, there's a fascinating story about Yusra (pictured at left, with Dorothy Garrod).

Yusra was one of the many women from the villages of Ljsim and Jeba in the Wady el-Mughara region of Palestine who became part of Dorothy Garrod's excavation team. Yusra was the most expert, her work deeply valued by Garrod. She stayed with the project through its full six-years, acting as excavation fore(wo)man – her trained eyes alert to stone tool and bone fragments.

Garrod encouraged Yusra to come study at Cambridge, and Yusra seemed eager to do it. In 1932, she found the famous Tabun-1 Neanderthal skull. Roughly 100,000 years old, it was an incredible find because most of the cranium and some of the facial features were intact. As Herridge notes, this would have been a career-making discovery for any other paleontologist. But for Yusra, a Palestinian woman without a college degree, it wasn't even enough for history to remember her last name:

Discoveries like hers are a once-in-a-career (and often career-making) event for a palaeontologist – just thinking about it makes my heart race.

Despite this, Yusra never made it to Cambridge. History intervened. Ljsim and Jeba were destroyed in 1948, and – as of 2010 – the Palestinian component of Garrod's team untraceable. I haven't even been able to discover her surname.

It's unclear what happened to Yusra, and it's tragic that we know so little about this citizen scientist who changed the way we understand human history.